Bug 168545

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User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

Description of problem:
When extracting files from a tar file on standard input, an error message "tar: Read 8704 bytes from -" is written to standard error. The number is not always 8704. The message causes an error window to open up numerous times when installing IDL 6.1 on RHEL4. If the /bin/tar executable is replaced with one from RHEL3 there is no message and no problem. The problem happens every time for certain tar files, and not at all for certain other tar files. It seems to always happen if the tar file was created with "-b 1". It does not happen on RHEL3.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
tar-1.14-4

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.echo hello >hello.txt
2.tar -b 1 -cf hello.tar hello.txt
3.cat hello.tar | tar xf -
  

Actual Results:  for step 3 above, this message on standard error:
tar: Read 2048 bytes from -

Expected Results:  no message

Additional info:

There is no error message if "-b 1" is used in the extract, as in:
cat hello.tar | tar -b 1 -xf -
The IDL 6.1 install script uses commands such as:
cat base1.tz | zcat | tar xf -
Since it is on CDROM, changing the script is non-trivial.
GNU tar 1.15.1 fixes a problem with extracting from standard input, but says the problem was introduced with 1.15, not 1.14.
ls -l /bin/tar: -rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 161380 Oct 11  2004 /bin/tar